Moscow Police Documents Show Attempted "Proverka" of Georgian School Children

Last Thursday, OMON (Otryad Militsii Osobogo Naznacheniya) raided Georgian casinos, restiurants, and markets under the guise of illegal immigration operations. Everyone knows the true reason: tensions between Russia and Georgia have reached a fever pitch. Many find the conflict rather strange. Georgia and Russia have deep historical ties. The state is considered Russia’s best friend in the Caucuses. But tensions have resurrected all sorts of ghosts: Stalin and Beria have been quick mention. The Georgian mafia, which has been tolerated for so long, is now an instant boogeyman. It has even generated discussion about Russian police corruption because the cops are so ready to take Georgian bribes. Finally, the incident has sparked humor. As one joke published in Kommersant reads: “The idiot Georgians—they lost their largest colony.” (“?????? ??????? – ???????? ????? ??????? ???? ???????.”)

All jokes aside, the raids are chilling, especially the formal inquiry the Russian police made to grade schools for lists of non-Russian students. The police wanted to “check” if the students’ parents are legal immigrants. Forget the fact that many non-Russians are Russian citizens (once again the problem of russkii/rossiisskii), or that Russian law guarantees children’s education despite the immigration status of the parents (read: “a son doesn’t answer for his father”), or that it is downright disgusting to get at parents through their children. But the Russian police denied any connection to the Georgian Affair or that Georgians were being specifically targeted.

This is where Novaya gazeta doesn’t miss a beat. In this week’s edition (the same with the memorial to Anna Politkovskaya), the editors have published police documents to the contrary. Here are translations:

For the purpose of securing law and order and abidance of the law, the prevention of terrorist acts and aggressive feelings between children—residents of Moscow and children of Georgian nationality please present to OVD Taganskii district of Moscow the following information:

F.I.O (family name, name, middle name), date and place of birth and residence children of Georgian nationality, and in which class they study.

F.I.O, date and place of birth and residence of parents, place of work, position, and family composition.

Relations of children of Georgian nationality with other pupils, cases of hostile relations between children, and such [hostile] relations toward them [i. e. Georgian children], facts about disobedience of Georgian children to teachers, facts of antisocial activities, and unlawful acts.

No. 2 Official inquiry with the stamp of OVD “Vernadskii Boulevard” UVD ZAO of Moscow

To Director Goi Sosh

Inquiry

I ask you to send present lists of people of Georgian nationality—students at your school with the following information. The student’s F.I.O, date of birth, address, home phone number, parents’ F.I.O. I ask you to send this information by 3 o’clock 4.10.2006. I ask you to send the answer to this inquiry by fax: 431-30-11. Telephone PDN: 431-30-13.

No. 3. The remarkable answer of the School Director to document No. 2.

Department of Education of the City of Moscow.General education middle school No. 169Moscow Institute of Open Education119415, Moscow, ul. Udal’tsova, 21.Tel: (095) 138-39-684 October 2006OVD “Vernadskii Boulevard”

In answer to your inquiry from 3 October on the presentation of lists of schoolchildren of Georgian nationality we inform you that a record of students by this national mark does not made in the school.

In order to produce a similar collection of information (carrying a confidential nature) and give them to another organization, we must receive consenting order from a higher authority—the Moscow Department of Education.

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Three days ago, Russian MVD commandos raided the offices of Garry Kasparov under the auspices of the “On combating extremism law.”The law, which was passed in July of this year, expanded the definition of “extremism” to include public slander of officials, as well and include acts of vandalism, racism, and other forms of political extremism.The law was originally passed to target the far Right, but hearings held by the Federation Council in October argued that the law should be expanded to include the far Left. A report prepared by the Prosecutor general’s Office for the hearings stated, “members of such informal groups of extremism inclination as skinheads, Russian National Unity and the National Bolshevik Party not only spread the idea of national, racial and religious enmity and hatred, they commit crimes on those grounds against the lives and health of citizens that cause public reaction.”The raid on Kasparov’s offices is a direct result.Kommersantdescribed the raid as follows:

At around 3 PM today, 15 commandos from the Internal Affairs Ministry’s anti-terrorism unit stormed into the Moscow headquarters of Garry Kasparov’s political party, the United Civil Front (OGF), and presented a warrant authorizing them to search the premises. The warrant stated that the unit had received a tip that the office contained literature that activists from the National Bolshevik Party and the “Red Youth Vanguard” plan to distribute at the “March of Dissent” on December 16. The premises were searched for information “about the possible dissemination of literature that contains public incitements to extremist acts.” OGF managing director Denis Bilunov told Kommersant that the police removed some books and newspapers from the office, including the books “Nord-Ost: The Unfinished Investigation,” “Beslan Against the Hostages,” and “The Putin Regime: Ideas and Practice,” as well as OGF newspapers, stickers, and agitprop materials for the “March of Dissent.”

The MVD press secretary claimed that there was “no search,” that the raid was “precautionary” and that “nothing was seized.”This is an obvious lie.The Kommersant report states that the MVD confiscated literature to examine for “extremist” content.While the “extremist law” provided the method, the real purpose was clear: outright political intimidation.The oppositionists, however, weren’t deterred and vowed to hold their march.

In a press conference on Thursday, members of the “Other Russia” coalition, which includes Kasparov, Eduard Limonov, and Ivan Starikov blasted the raid as “an absolute violation of our constitutional rights.”Kasparov added, “Without a doubt, such actions are an attempt by the authorities to apply the law against extremism…to those who do not belong to Putin’s ruling party.Now the authorities and the president understand that the opposition has finally united, and thus they are using their full repressive mechanism of intimidation.”Those familiar with protest politics in the United States will hear an eerie echo in Other Russia’s complaints.American activists often have to deal with the same types of preemptive raids, arrests, and intimidation.

Such statements about the violation of rights, while ideally true, might have no material legal weight.Here the Russian extremist law reveals its janus face: it expands the definition of extremism to uphold one’s “constitutional rights” by cracking down on political activity that falls outside the mainstream, but at the same time violates those constitutional rights by defining the mainstream itself via the exclusion of what has been deemed extremist. The extremist law therefore upholds and the same time it violates “constitutional rights.”

One shouldn’t be surprised that this. And it is apparent that Kasparov isn’t.It’s clear from his above statement that he understands that the extremist law is an attempt to not only exclude certain groups and ideologies from politics, but to define the very borders of acceptable politics itself.All laws that categorize certain groups outside the law (i.e. extremists, fascists, anarchists, terrorists, enemy combatants) inevitably re-inscribe them back into it.That is to say, the very law that ensures, protects, upholds freedom at the same time regulates, violates, and undermines it.

In this sense “Other Russia” is morally right but perhaps legally wrong. The MVD raid was a violation of their rights in that they do have a right to express their political views without state intimidation and coercion. But they are also wrong in that the state itself has the right to define what legally constitutes “extremism” and therefore the constitutive meaning of the very democratic rights Other Russia claims were violated.

The theoretics of law and political rights aside, Other Russia held their march in Moscow despite the mayor’s office banned it.Estimates put it at 2000, but possibly up to 3000 demonstrators.A portion of these numbers were decimated in preemptive arrests by police.Reports say that hundreds were detained as they came off of buses and trains.At the march, protesters chanted slogans like “Freedom” and held banners reading “No to Police State” and “Russia Without Putin.”According to police spokesman, Yevgeny Gildeyev, about 8,500 police were deployed throughout the city.A thousand of them were perched in riot gear with police dogs in hand at the march itself.

The question will now be whether “the March of Dissent” will be more than a symbolic gesture.It is true that it shows an opposition united.But unity is not enough for such a small group of outsiders looking to make inroads with an electorate.The same analysis that one applies to the leftist opposition in America can be applied to their Russian counterparts.A successful movement cannot generate support if their message is simply being against power.It must provide its own alternative course that appeals to people’s lives.Shouting about freedom and democracy is fine, but these are abstractions that have no stable definition and often no material affect.Most citizens go throughout their lives never feeling the injustice that the opposition is claiming.

Politics, however, is rarely played among the masses.It is more often the game of the few.Here the over the top police presence was certainly a sign that the state was watching with concern.However, some may say that the protest was unsuccessful because protestors only outnumbered police by 2 to 1.But really, it was the state that lost this one.First, the state’s unwarranted intimidation and coercion made the “March of Dissent” news.The English language press is already eating the story up.Second, having so many police shows that Other Russia poses a threat to someone and something in the government.Other Russia can therefore take this as a sign that they have some political impact since their political influence is nil. Third, the fact that Other Russia successfully defied the city’s ban on the march and got a decent turnout gives them an emotional and moral victory.Whether that can be harnessed into real political action remains to be seen.

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In my younger days, I used to hang out with a group of SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) skinheads from El Monte, California.We used to go to clubs, drink, share our appreciation for punk and ska music, and our mutual hatred for racist skinheads.SHARPs came in a variety of political shades.Some were self-identified communists, socialists and anarchists.Others, at least the ones I befriended, were Latino youths who, instead of getting mixed up in traditional gangs, gravitated to a more political variant.They would get into street fights with racist skinheads or would vandalize known skinheads’ houses and cars.They were a rough bunch.I remember one night after clubbing, a bunch of them went searching for a local Armenian gang with baseball bats and steel pipes in hand.That night, the Armenians beat up one of their comrades and they were looking to extract some revenge.

Years later, I had another friend, a socialist and pacifist, who used to be a SHARP in Fontana, California.In the 1980s and 1990s, Fontana was known as a hotbed of Klan and skinhead activity. One day I asked him why he got out of it.He told me that, every SHARP he was friends with was now in prison for assault, vandalism or other crimes.But his conversion away from SHARP was much more personal.He told me that one night at a party, a racist skinhead pulled a gun on him and his girlfriend.Thankfully, neither he nor his girlfriend was harmed, but the incident provided him much reflection.He realized that despite their antithetical political views, he and the racists were no different.Violence made them an inverted reflection of each other.

Still, knowing the different between fascist and anti-fascist skins can be a matter of life or death. How do you tell the difference? After all, both have shaved heads and wear bomber jackets, Dr. Marten boots, and jeans. So how do you tell? Look at their shoe laces. If they are red, they are anti-fascist. White means fascist. Other symbols might give you clues. Pins, patches and tattoos were other symbolic markers for where they stand.

I was reminded of all this while I was reading Il’ia Donskii’s article “I Recognize My Love by the Stripes: What Differentiates Fascists from Anti-Fascists? Almost Nothing,” in this week’s Novaya Gazeta. Donskii notes that the differences between Russian facist and anti-facsist youth are so slight and symbolic that they are virtually undetectable to the untrained eye. They look the same: jeans, bomber jackets, and combat boots. Sometimes they even can’t tell the difference between each other:

Take for example the fight after the Nekondishn concert at the club “Archeology” on 15 September 2006. Then two guys (probably young Nazis) were severely beaten and received multiple stab wounds. As usual, the authorities at first accused anti-fascists of the crime. Then because there were several incontrovertible contradictions (first, anti-fascists never use knives, and second the attackers cried, “Death to anti-fascists!”), the Nazis themselves recognized that it was a misunderstanding and one right wing gang attacked the other. Dmitrii Demushkin, the leader of the openly fascist organization “Slavic Union” (usually abbreviated SS) spoke about this and added, “No one can tell the difference because the clothes are all the same–fascist or anti-fascist. They simply kill.”

Donskii explains that the difference between Russian fascist and anti-fascist youth is literally in the numbers. Fascists love the number “8” because in the Latin alphabet, the letter “h” is the the eighth letter. So “88” means “Heil Hitler”. “18”–Adolph Hitler, and “14” stands for the Nazi slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.”

But not all self-identified Nazi skins know about the substance of “14” or really anything about Nazi ideology. “14” is just a symbol to identify themselves. There is even a word for these ideologically ignorant–Karlans. These are usually fascists younger than 16 new to the skinhead subculture. But be sure, they may not know the intricacies of fascist thought, but they do know the symbols that differentiate themselves from the anti-fascists. The problem is that these symbols of difference work best when the skins travel in packs. The mistake the two Nazis above made was not traveling in the group.

Anti-fascists play their own symbols game. Many wear red handkerchiefs or shoelaces, just like my SHARP friends, to denote left wing or anti-fascism. And while their fascist enemies like the number “8”, they like “46”–“destroy fascism” and “69”–“Remember the spirit of 69”, that is 1969, when the skinhead movement was founded in Britain. Many forget that skinheads were originally anti-racist and heavily influenced by the black Caribbean communities in London.

What is facsinating about all of this is that while Donskii, you, I and many others may see the differences as “almost nothing”, they are in fact enormous. Wearing red shoelaces means life or death, depending who you come upon first. But despite the enormity in meaning, the minutia of difference can sometimes produce a disorientating symbolic cacophony even among its practitioners.

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Yesterday, I wrote about Putin and the task of controlling the regional power. An article in today’s Kommersant gives a picture of one of the methods the Kremlin is using to not only combat political opposition to its rule, but to combat corruption and oppositionists within United Russia itself. However, while this may be the end, the means hark back to both a Soviet past and the timelessness of generational conflict.

The method is a group of youths called Molodaia gvardiia(Young Guard). The name’s Soviet connotations can’t be missed. Molodaia gvardiia was the main journal and publishing house of the Komsomol, not to mention a synonym for its role in the Soviet Union. Its Komsomol roots, however, go much deeper than its namesake. Its task is to not only search for enemies of Putin; it also seeks to root out corruption and intransigent regional leaders, even if they are high profile politicians or members of United Russia. According to its leader Ivan Demidov, “No one in the Party is free from responsibility. We must influence power. And if conflicts arise in the regions, which Radov [a pioneering activist in Molodaia gvardiia] spoke about, we will be on the side of the law before anything.” When asked if this meant moving against corrupt officials in United Russia, Demidov cautiously answered, “all will depend on the situation.”

But others contend that there is no conflict between United Russia and Molodaia gvardiia. One representative from United Russia told Kommersant that “that United Russia was prepared to deal with internal corruption itself” and that the group was a good idea because “they could help us.” Others, like political analysis Stanislav Belskovskii see the youth group as a means to pit the young idealists against the entrenched old guard as a way to wage internal party struggles within United Russia. “In the upcoming elections in 2007, Molodaia gvardiia by its own initiative will search for enemies of Putin and possibly will be used to struggle against competitors of United Russia, with Party life first of all,” Belskovskii told Kommersant.

Conforming to the Party line might just be the task. In February, members of Molodaia gvardiia demanded the resignation the governor of Perm for aiding fascists by being lax support to antifascist efforts in the region. Observers then noticed that the apparent call from below coincided with the Kremlin’s desire to clamp down on the governor.

It is here that Putin’s Molodaia gvardiia harks back to a more particular Soviet incarnation: the Legkaia kavaleriia (Light Cavalry). The Light Cavalry was a movement within the Komsomol that Nikolai Bukharin initiated in a speech at the 8th Komsomol Congress in 1928. Bukharin, among others, called for the League to create “initiative groups” to conduct “raids” of Soviet shops and factories to root out corruption and bureaucratism. The move was justified with reference to a section of a speech Lenin gave at the 3rd Komsomol Congress in 1921, which outlined the tasks of the Youth League:

It is the task of the Young Communist League to organize assistance everywhere, in village or city block, in such matters as — and I shall take a small example — public hygiene or the distribution of food. How was this done in the old, capitalist society? Everybody worked only for himself and nobody cared a straw for the aged and the sick, or whether housework was the concern only of the women, who, in consequence, were in a condition of oppression and servitude. Whose business is it to combat this? It is the business of the Youth Leagues, which must say: we shall change all this; we shall organize detachments of young people who will help to assure public hygiene or distribute food, who will conduct systematic house-to-house inspections, and work in an organized way for the benefit of the whole of society, distributing their forces properly and demonstrating that labor must be organized. (“Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” Collected Works, vol. 31)

The Light Cavalry was more than simple “shock force” against poor accounting and bureaucrats. Their “raids” on Soviet institutions also incorporated class politics. Cavalristy routinely denounced corrupt Party members, traders, kulaks, and other “alien elements” they found in factories and shops. In addition, the military rhetoric of the Light Calvary should not be overlooked. Their penchant for military metaphors was part of a general cultural trends in the late 1920s, when Komsomols spoke of their activism in terms of armies, soldiers, campaigns, raids, scouts, fronts, fights, and battles. These expressions symbolized the attempt by a generation to memorialize a civil war that had preceded them by ten years.If the Komsomols of the late 1920s were using the opportunity to fight their “civil war,” what are Putin’s young guardians fighting for? Social mobility is surely one. There is no better way to rise in the ranks by denouncing your elders. Battles against internal and external enemies is a good way to cut one’s political teeth. Access to regional power is another. Be sure that those who root out corruption will get the nod for those new vacant positions. Thus the young continues to eat its old. Or as Turgenev eloquently put it:

“So that,” began Pavel Petrovich, “that is our modern youth! Those young men are our heirs!”

“Our heirs!” repeated Nikolai Petrovich with a weary smile. He had been sitting as if on thorns throughout the argument, and only from time to time cast a sad furtive glance at Arkady. “Do you know what I was reminded of, brother? I once quarreled with our mother; she shouted and wouldn’t listen to me. At last I said to her, ‘Of course you can’t understand me; we belong to two different generations.’ She was terribly offended, but I thought, ‘It can’t be helped–a bitter pill, but she has to swallow it.’ So now our turn has come, and our successors can tell us: ‘You don’t belong to our generation; swallow your pill.'”

Update: There is another, perhaps more important Soviet connection to Putin’s Molodaia gvardiia. Molodaia gvardiia was also an Komsomol underground anti-fascist partisan group formed in 1942 after the Nazis occupied Krasnodon. Their existance and membership was revealed to the Nazis by turncoats in the groups. In Janurary 1943, the Nazis began arrests of its 80 or so members. Only eleven members escaped capture. All seventy arrested were tortured and thrown to their death in Coal Mine No. 5. Its leaders Oleg Koshevoy, Lyubov Shevtsova, Viktor Subbotin, Dmitry Ogurtsov, Sergei Ostapenkov were shot the next month in the town of Rovenki, only five days before the Red Army liberated it on Feburary 14, 1943. The Soviet novelist Alexsandr Fadeyev wrote a novel called Molodaia gvardiia commemorating its underground activities.

Of all the Soviet connections cited above, I now think that this is the memory the Putin group is hoping to tap–a patriotic youth organization committed to fighting fascism and enemies of the state.